Wednesday, 29 March 2017

I'm posting another report of the imam Uthman Badar and his statement that killing Muslim apostates is a requirement of Islamic doctrine.

Badar speaks with an Australian accent. I assume he's born and brought up in our lovely, tolerant, multicultural country. Yet he still has horrid views like these. Must be something in the water... or perhaps in what he learnt in his Islamic school, or at his mosque or simply by reading the Koran.

Note his repeated reference to the fact that killing apostates is founded solidly in Islamic teachings. Does that make Badar a horrid "Islamophobe"?

Hizb ut-Tahrir means "Party of Revolution". The Revolution Badar wants is the establishment of a caliphate and imposition of Sharia Law on all under the caliph.

Note Badar's horror that Islam should be moderated and modernized. To him modernity is to be feared.

What a crap religion. And what a crap man who is a negative contribution to society. A value-subtracted item. A POS....

/Snip

A leader of a hardline Islamist group which campaigns for sharia law says Muslims who leave the religion should be put to death.

Hizb ut-Tahrir spokesman Uthman Badar was frank when asked about the group's policy at a forum in Bankstown, in Sydney's south-west, on Saturday night.

'The ruling for apostates as such in Islam is clear, that apostates attract capital punishment and we don't shy away from that,' Badar said in the presence of children. An apostate is someone who decides to leave Islam. 'The ruling for apostates as such in Islam is clear, that apostates attract capital punishment and we don't shy away from that,' Badar said in the presence of children. An apostate is someone who decides to leave Islam.

Wednesday, 15 March 2017

From Tarek Fatah, a straight-spoken, moderate, reformist Canadian Muslim, speaks sense in this article.
A pox on the Chelsey Clintonian mobs of Po-mo cultural relativists.
I know a number of folks who share her virtue-signalling views. They are so certain of their rectitude: all cultures are equal and all need to be equally respected.
But it ought to be clear from cursory research that the notion of "all cultures are equal"is a crock. A society with human sacrifice? Ripping the hearts out of children? Throwing gays off roofs?*
http://www.torontosun.com/2017/03/14/its-ok-to-say-western-civilization-is-superior* OK, so I don't know of any culture that still does the first two anymore. Is the third any less bad? It's culture equal to all others?

Tuesday, 14 March 2017

This is a must read. The pernicious influence around the world by our so-called ally, the horrid Saudi Arabia, has been reported in our own South China Morning Post, but virtually ignored in the Australian press, other than in this report in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Professor Brahma Chellany of the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi estimates that since the 1970s, Saudi Arabia has spent over $US200 billion ($266 billion) on "its global jihad project, including funding Wahhabi madrassas [Islamic schools], mosques, clerics and books."

Indonesia is one of the prime targets for the Saudi missionary project: "Wahhabist money going into Indonesia is one of the things that has started to undercut the traditional accommodating and syncretist view of Islam in Indonesia," says Allan Gyngell, former head of Australia's peak intelligence body, the Office of National Assessments, and former head of the Lowy Institute.

"In fact, it's been a far more dangerous trend, I think, than some of the things that have received more publicity, like some of the extremist groups such as al-Qaeda."

How? "These groups are very important in their own right, but the money going into the madrassas has been undercutting the foundation of Indonesian Islam, helping to reshape the conventional approaches to Islam in Indonesia. Young people won't turn out extremist, but they will have a more puritanical, less accommodating view of Islam. It is undermining pancasila, the thing that, from the beginning, has kept Indonesia together and been profoundly beneficial to Australia."

King Salman announced $US1 billion in social aid for Indonesia, including money for schools, and a $US6 billion injection into Indonesia's state-owned oil firm. He announced unlimited flights between the two countries. His most popular gift, however, was an extra 50,000 places a year for Indonesian pilgrims making the hajj to Mecca and Medina.

The Saudis have been pressing for the tripling of the size of their Wahhabist university in Indonesia, which offers free tuition, and it is expected that Jakarta, reluctantly, will agree.

In the face of the Saudis' relentless, pernicious proselytising, what has Australia done? Cut its aid funding for Indonesian schools and more than halved the number of scholarships it offers to Indonesians to study in Australia.

Monday, 13 March 2017

I'm watching ABC's weekly Q &A.
A young fellow asked about Bill Leak's recent death. Leak was The Australian's cartoonist, known for his irreverent style and most controversially for a cartoon of a deadbeat dad. In this case an aboriginal deadbeat dad. That's what got him charged with a hate crime under article 18C of the Human Rights Act.
The questioner was troubled for the fact that many lefties had celebrated Leak's death. And asked if this said something about our inability to hear views we don't agree with.
How did the panel answer? To a man and woman they dumped in Leak.
Shame, shame on them.
They barely got to say they didn't celebrate his death (gee!) before they were into his "insensitivity", his "racism", his "increasingly narrowly race focused cartoons". The Canadian lady panelist -- a truly horrid example of the virtue-signaling self-righteous left -- opined that "this wouldn't happen in Canada" -- as if we care how we measure up to Canada! -- and that Australia was therefore lagging the Ay-Oh state in enlightenment. Another woman panelist asked why we want free speech "in order that we can insult and vilify" thus comprehensively missing the point of free speech, yet garnering audience applause.
Pissants all of them.

This is a thoroughly good article. Spot on and factually correct. Wood is particularly right in supporting Ayaan Hirsi Ali's visit to Australia, a visit that regressive Muslims and Leftists are trying to stop, free speech be damned.
I read this article today in the print edition of The Australian, on my way down to Hobart.

Four Corners of Australia 'a ABC, with a disturbing documentary.
Socialism is not the answer to rapacious capitalists. But how to change them, to get them to have a social conscience? One answer has to be the awakening of shareholders and in turn pressuring Boards to have more than next week's profit margin in mind.

Islam, the idea, (the ideology, the religion) must be subject to scrutiny and criticism, just as catholicism, communism, fascism or capitalism are. Ideas cannot take offense no matter what the criticism. I criticise communism. That doesn't mean I'm a Sinophobe.

Yet George mixes people and ideas so that any critic of Islam (as I am) becomes a Muslim-hating islamophobe (which I am not).

He sees his targets as part of an "Islamophobic right-wing network".

I can't discern any "network" despite having followed the issues for twenty years. Moreover critics of problematic aspects of Islam range across the field: on the Left, there's Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Maajid Nawaz, Hirsi Ali, Ali Rizvi Myriam Namazie, and many others. True liberals will find fault with misogyny, homophobia, sectarianism, intolerance, lack of religious freedom and so on, wherever it appears, in Islamic doctrines and practices or not.

Concern about new mosque building may be rational.Four separate studies in the US, including one by the NYPD and one by a Muslim sheik, have shown over 80% of American mosques promote disturbingly violent sermons and literature.

An undercover (Muslim) photographer recently went back to Regent's Park Mosque in London. She found imams teaching the subjugation of women, hatred of non-Muslims and killing of homosexuals. This, years after mosque officials had promised to improve since the first "undercover mosque" exposé.Nothing had changed.

In my own country, Australia, authorities are right now dealing with state-run schools that have allowed Muslim male pupils not to shake hands with females and excluded female teachers from public activities such as graduation days. All done under pressure of Islamic values.

Surely these are illiberal things that must be resisted by liberals everywhere, without being branded "Islamophobes". We have fought for centuries to develop inclusive, fair and tolerant societies. We don't want to give up those values.

Criticisms of illiberal values by people Left, Right or centre is only proper.

It is not islamophobia, no matter how much apologists like associate professor George may say so.

Saturday, 4 March 2017

I wrote a letter recently, to the Financial Times, taking on Professor Ralph M. Coury's assertions on the wonders of Islamic history. The Times chose to run a letter similar to mine, but -- let's be frank -- more elegant, from a David Critchley:

A week later a counter, by Dr Salam Rassi, which I post both to be "fair and balanced", and to remind me to get the books recommended, by Khaled El-Rouayheb and Peter Adamson.

Hong Kong's finest rushed out to Discovery Bay the other day and arrested a couple with five marijuana plants and some "suspected" seedlings. (What were they suspected of, one wonders). ["Couple arrested over Discovery Bay cannabis farm", TRENDING March 4].

Some say "bravo!"

I say, what a waste of time.

Here's a story to put this in context.

I recently attended the 50th anniversary of my high school Class of '67 in Australia. We'd graduated into what became known as the "Summer of love". Most of us went to university where "sex, drugs and rock & roll" were not just a slogan. I can say with personal knowledge that every one of those men at our boys' school reunion had experimented with smoking pot. Some -myself included - "experimented" rather longer than others and with more than just pot.

But here's the point: at our 50th reunion we were now men in our sixties who had become husbands, fathers, grandfathers, in one case a great-grandfather. Some of us still worked; many of us were retired. We had been, or still were, farmers, teachers, headmasters, lawyers, doctors, diplomats, businessmen, novelists and artists. Not a one of smoked tobacco any more, let alone marijuana. Not a one of us was any worse for our experimentation 50 years ago (we were living proof of the fact that most people drift out of drugs as they age. Alcohol aside).

In short we had lived productive, fulfilled and happy lives. With all the ups and downs that that entails. Happy families prevailed.

Now, imagine the opposite. Imagine if the police 50 years ago had rushed into one of our many parties and arrested us all. Off to jail for us. We would have been imprisoned, each one of us, possibly for many years. The cost to the state would have been enormous. The cost to each one of us even greater: ruined lives; no hope of professional careers.

My point is simple: the police here wasted their time, the time and perhaps the careers of the couple arrested. They will shortly waste the time of judges and correctional officers. And for what? To implement an outdated law that's clearly out of touch with the damage it does our society.

The police were only doing their duty, of course. Presumably a neighbor had complained about the couple. What this says is that the law needs changing before more lives, time and money wasted.

Friday, 3 March 2017

The nasty nasty influence of this nasty nasty country promoting its nasty nasty version of a nasty nasty religion.
Saudi Arabia our alleged "ally", lobs into Indonesia big time, promoting the wonders of horrid horrid Wahhabism in our back yard.
Indonesia, supposedly a "moderate Muslim" country has already been drifting steadily Islamist, steadily less tolerant, steadily ready to kill unbelievers.
The last thing we need in our back yard is Saudi's King, his hundreds of hangers on, his 502 tonnes of gear, to come over our way promoting even more crazy versions of Islam. Stay in the Middle East for goodness sake.
Australia ought to be afraid. Very afraid.The Atlantic on this topic

I've just updated my list of Terrorist organisations in the world. The latest addition was an outfit I'd never heard of before: an Islamic terrorist organisation in Germany called Fussilet 33, which name is from the 33rd Surah in the Koran, calling for all Muslims to fight non-Muslims.
Here's the summary. 75% of all terrorist organisations are Islamic. Of terrorist organisations that are religiously inspired, 94% are Islamic.
The Religion of Peace...

I wrote a letter about the Muslim Brotherhood in the International New York Timesthe other day. It was in response to a Times front-page op-ed by Gehad El-Haddad, a Muslim Brother (in Egyptian jail as he wrote; how does that work?!) painting a picture of the Brotherhood as a kind of Middle Eastern Rotary Club. All charity, social justice and kumbayah. I must say I found it rather rich that the Times, the "newspaper or record", should give front page cover to an Islamist .
Over the years, I've read a lot on the Brotherhood including its founding fathers' original writings: like "On Jihad" by Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Brotherhood (and grandfather of the oleaginous Tariq Ramadan, beloved of know-nothings on the Left, like Amanpour on CNN) "Milestones" by the Brotherhood's first and still most influential ideologist Sayyid Qutb.

Qutb, by the way, is perhaps the only person to have established a terrorist progenitor, the mother of all Sunni extremism, simply because of sexual repression. This unlovely little man visited the US in the fifties and was "shocked.. shocked, I tell you!" at what he saw there -- which in fifties America was actually pretty tame at least to we infidels: young ladies in a rural town dancing with young men. Oh, the horror!
But it infected Qutb's ideology so that he thereafter he wrote at tedious length about how the world had to turn to Islam. "Islam is the answer" was his catchphrase after the ill-fated US sojourn and the phrase still in use today. And still fuels Islam's inherent supremacism.
What I didn't know until I read this article in the Wall Street Journal, was that the Brotherhood has split into various factions including ones that promote violence. This is of course yet another mark against the lovey-dovey picture painted by the Brother's op-ed in the New York Times.
Its summary:

The Trump administration should note these developments. Designating the entire Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a terrorist organization wouldn't reflect today's realities—to say nothing of a blanket designation against all Brotherhood-affiliated groups in the world. Instead the administration should target specific individuals, factions and spinoff groups that have been involved in terrorist activity. Then the administration can move to the larger and more critical question: how to tackle comprehensively the overall Islamist ideology.

Do you think this, in the International New York Times, is an unfair assessment of Trump's Tuesday speech to Congress? Surely not.
It's true -- not "fake news" -- that he barely mentioned foreign policy. And when he did it was in terms of war.

Thursday, 2 March 2017

Just now Richard Quest of CNN money has been on TV saying that the reasons Venezuela is barreling towards bankruptcy are the falling price of oil, corruption, economic mismanagement and so on.

Well, no doubt these are factors. The clue to the real underlying cause of Venezuela's meltdown is in the "economic mismanagement" factor.

In turn, the reason for that?

One word: SOCIALISM.

I've lived, studied and worked in socialist countries (China, North Korea, Vietnam). There's not one that works well. Socialism leads to economic mismanagement. It leads to corruption.

As for the oil price? Sure it's down.

But when it was up, Chavez and Maduro just gave the windfall away. Free or nearly so. Petrol at $0.01 / litre, for goodness sake! Nice for drivers. Idiocy for the country.

Meantime what did Norway do with its own oil windfall? Invested it in a well-managed and transparent Oil Fund. As a result they now have £700 billion, €130,000 for every. Norwegian man, woman and child.

Watching a live Town Hall meeting with John McCain and Lindsay Graham on CNN.
These two men, these senators and foreign policy / military policy experts, are fine and honorable men. They know whereof they speak.
Trump should listen to them on all matters
from ISIS and Palestine/Israel to red lines for North Korea. On the latter the red line is them developing an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear weapon.
Graham knows the regime. He jokes that it lost him when they claimed Great Leader Kim Il-sung had shot a round of golf of 38.
China should be told to tell Kim Jong-un that if he develops the nuke-able ICBM that can reach the US, then there will be consequences. Not just for North Korea but also for China.
These are sound, thoughtful, capable guys.
John calls Lindsay "entertaining and capable". True! He's got a real sense of humor.
Lindsay says John is "loyal to his friends and loyal to his country. He would die for his country." True again! In fact he nearly did die for his country in Vietnam. John tears up....
A lovely finish. I'm really with these guys.

Wednesday, 1 March 2017

I'm watching this now and so far seems pretty much of the same. As we've seen through the Primaries, Debates, Inauguration speech and since.
Some random observations:
Exporting motor vehicles: he bemoans the alleged fact the countries US could export cars and motor bikes to have high tariffs whereas the US has none. He's wrong on at least the export side: Europe and Japan have zero tariffs on vehicle imports. Zero.
There are other good reasons the US exports hardly any vehicles. One of which is, or at least used to be up to eight years ago when I last drove a US car in the US, that they're crap. Another is that the US is itself a big market that doesn't need to export.
Obamacare: why is it that the rest of the world manages to have health care cheaper than the US without having to re-legislate it and change it every year. What's wrong with you America??
Then again isn't it weird that Trump tweeted yesterday "nobody knew that Heath care was so complicated"! Well, I think Hillary and Obama do.
Crime: the same old false ""fact": that US has record crimes. Truth is - and there IS a truth here - that US crime including murder rates are at historical lows.

"...it is the duty of those who have accepted Islam to strive unceasingly to convert or subjugate those who have not. This obligation is without limit of time or space. It must continue until the whole world has either accepted the Islamic faith or submitted to the power of the Islamic state."

-- Bernard Lewis, renowned historian of Islam and the Middle East, in The Political Language of Islam, p72-3.

In other words:

"Islam is unique among religions of the world in having a developed doctrine, theology and legal system that mandates warfare against unbelievers."